19 July 2015

running an application as ADMIN always

Often you are required to run an application as an Administrator, otherwise, the application might not start at all or it might not work to its full extent. On windows platform, few such examples include but not limited to Visual Studio, Internet Information Services (IIS), etc. To debug an application you need to start visual studio as an ADMIN and for IIS, you need to be an ADMIN even to open it.

Sometimes it so happens that, you start Visual Studio (VS) and when you try to debug you get a warning saying, you cannot debug, because Visual Studio (VS) is not running as an ADMIN. Then you need to exit VS and start again as an Admin. So wouldn't be great if you able to start such app always as an ADMIN by default?.

Below are the steps to run an application as an ADMIN always (on Windows 7 OS). You need to be an Admin on the System to do this changes!

Locate the application EXE. Right Click on the EXE and open the Application Properties window.

Select Compatibility tab and Click on the button, "Change Settings for all Users".

It opens up another window with options to manage "Compatibility for all users". Under Privilege section, check the option "Run this program as an Administrator" option and save the changes.

After these changes, next time when you start an application, it will start by default an administrator, which definitely will save some time for you!